Saturday, April 21, 2007
(Assignment Post) Reading Week 12
Please post at least two thoughtful comments on the reading for this week: the JSTOR article Going with the Flow: Performance Art and Mass Culture, by Philip Auslander. You may post on any issue raised in the text, but please site your source. You might consider especially what new elements you would add to Auslander's arguments given the almost twenty years since his writing of this piece. What trajectories can you follow? What claims may still stand? Do you sees breaks or cycles?
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2 comments:
From the little I know about post-modernism, I have heard one signifying feature is that mass-media has created a generation that no longer thinks, or is unable to think, linearly. Auslander’s reference of Williams and Polan (p.125) commenting about juxtaposition of different discourses in television and the creation of a “montagist social text” reminded me of this. I have always felt that a person’s mind is like a collage. Is this because I was born into a postmodern society of “mutating babble”? Do I think in collage or montage because of the influence of mass media? Auslander also mentions Schechner (p.129)predicting that “In-between is becoming the norm.” Since everything has apparently been done, the only thing to do in a postmodern world is collage things that have already been done. Since I’m apparently unable to think linearly, I suppose I’ve been well conditioned to appreciate and create collage/montage babble, which I think is great because otherwise I probably wouldn’t enjoy postmodern society so much (The Simpsons, Mr. Show, Lost, VAPA).
In the notes section of the essay (#2), Huyssen makes the observation that the culture industry has much more power than individual artists. Indeed it is the mass-media executives that determine what content is “massed”, and therefore the ones that direct the changes in flow of social consciousness. In reference to the show “Lost” mentioned above, there are some very interesting qualities that relate to this article and to a postmodern audience. First, during their second season they aired fake commercials during commercial breaks that advertised fictional companies associated with the Lost world. Second, the Sprite “sublyminal advertisements” that correlated with the release of a Lost online game were apparently designed from research that said viewers remember commercials better in fast-forward than in real time. Thirdly, if you don’t like Lost, you’re not cool.
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